


META: The Force Awakens and Original Trilogy Parallels

by rexluscus



Series: Rex's Star Wars Meta [8]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-09-14 11:43:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16912257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rexluscus/pseuds/rexluscus
Summary: Why the plot call-outs inThe Force Awakensto the originalStar Warstrilogy are interesting.





	META: The Force Awakens and Original Trilogy Parallels

A lot of people hated TFA's plot parallels to the OT and thought it made the sequel trilogy into a reboot or a rehash. I don’t think that’s true at all. The ST parallels with the OT are so interesting to me, because the ST heroes often share characteristics with  _more than one_ OT character. That keeps us from predicting where the story is going to go. Here is an exhaustive break-down of these parallels:

**Poe as Han, Luke and Leia**

Poe is really interesting, because the plot associates himwith all three of the OT heroes, in quick succession. For starters, his “handsome rogue/hotshot pilot” vibe is pure Han Solo (and his relationship with BB-8 is a little like Han’s with Chewie)—except, utterly unlikeHan, he’s fully committed to the rebel cause and he’s earnest as hell. So at the beginning of the film, he drops right into the Luke role, but to the version of Luke  _after_ he’s committed himself to the rebel cause, when he’s trying to get a droid carrying essential information to the rebels. (He’s even sent on his mission by Leia, just like Luke and Obi-Wan are.) But unlike Luke’s, Poe’s quest fails to get off the ground. Within 15 minutes, he’s Leia, getting captured and interrogated. His rescue by Finn is uncannily similar to Leia’s rescue by Luke—except that it happens super early. Within the first half hour of TFA, Poe works his way through all of Leia’s story beats in ANH (although his torture is more reminiscent of Han’s in ESB than Leia’s in ANH). Once he escapes in the TIE fighter, he hops into Han’s role in the escape from the Death Star, with Finn playing Luke—except that Finn is a real and not a fake Stormtrooper, and they don’t successfully escape. They effectively transform the Millennium Falcon into the escape pod that delivers the droids to Tatooine, rewinding us from the middle of ANH to the beginning.

So Poe’s first-act subplot quickly recapitulates the first two acts of ANH, except that  _his_ amalgamated OT hero fails, marooning Finn in the story without a guide. It’s as if Poe represents the familiar character tropes of the OT, and then when he appears to die, he leaves  _us_ adrift, and leaves Finn with the scraps of that shattered OT hero to pick up and temporarily adopt as Finn begins to discover who he is. All of this says to us that in the ST, the OT approach to heroism will not apply; the villains are stronger and the heroes don’t have nearly as much luck on their side.

**Rey as Luke and Leia**

Obviously, Rey is a lot like Luke: she’s a Force-sensitive child hidden away (maybe deliberately) on a desert planet where an old Force sage (Lor San Tekka) lives. But in the ST, nobody takes care of her (except an awful, slaver parent-figure, Unkar Plutt), and she never even meets the sage. Obi-Wan mentored Luke for the first half of ANH before getting cut down by the villain; Lor San Tekka gets cut down by the new villain in the first five minutes. Also, he’s not a Jedi, he’s someone who worshipsthe Force without being able to use it (that we know of). In short, we have a similar hero but no one to teach her about the Force, and she’s been abandoned by the family who gave Luke a stable (if boring) upbringing. So, like Poe, Rey’s character tells us that this is a very different world than that of the OT—one without parents or guides or even much historical memory. In this world, nobody is teaching or even raisingthe new generation. If Rey has a mentor, it’s the  _myths_ she’s heard about Luke Skywalker, and she doesn’t even know if they’re true. (And I’m 100% certain that in TLJ, when Rey tries to hand the Symbolic Lightsaber back to its mythic owner, Luke is going to turn it down.)

If we compare Rey with Poe, though, who tried and failed to replay the heroes of the OT, we could surmise that Rey’s isolation might actually be her  _strength._ That she’s cut off from the wider world of the OT might make her  _more_ effective in this new one.

Rey also plays the Leia role in the second act of TFA: she gets captured by the villain and is rescued by the male heroes. But she turns out to be a little more self-sufficient: like Leia, she resists interrogation, but Leia just survives it whereas Rey fights back and wins. She also frees herself before the guys get there (Leia did have to be let out of her cell before she could start kicking ass) and she participates actively in the destruction of the super-weapon. So Rey is a kind of Luke-Leia combo, which is TFA’s biggest effort to even out the gender imbalance in the OT.

**Finn as Luke and Han**

Like Rey, Finn is a parentless child raised by slavers. Almost immediately, he steps into the Luke role by rescuing a rebel from the villains. But he does it too early— _he_ doesn’t quite know who he is yet, unlike Luke, who had a mentor to help him realize his destiny and true self before he set out on his quest. Luke was a reluctant hero who took an entire act to accept his quest, whereas Finn is immediately thrown into the quest by necessity. He’s just trying to survive, and like Rey, he’s only got an inner mentor—his conscience, which may also be the Force—even if he doesn’t realize it yet.

Finn’s role in Poe’s escape, of course, parallels Luke’s role in Leia’s escape in ANH, except that Finn  _actually is_ a Stormtrooper—albeit one who wants to rebel—whereas Luke was a rebel disguised as a Stormtrooper. When Finn takes off his Stormtrooper armor and puts on Poe’s jacket, he’s performing Luke’s disguise in reverse—"disguising" himself, not to blend in behind enemy lines but to reject his old, ill-fitting villainous identity. When Rey accuses him of being a jacket thief, she “sees through” the disguise, in one sense (she knows the jacket isn’t  _his_ ), but in another sense, she makes a mistake—much the way Leia both mistook Luke for a Stormtrooper and saw through  _his_  disguise (“aren’t you a little short for a Stormtrooper?”) The whole sequence flips and reverses the Luke/Leia meeting, because while Luke pulls off the mask of evil to reveal the newly minted rebel underneath,  _Finn_ is caught  _in_ a rebel mask he tries to pass off as real (and in so doing, he  _makes_ it real). So with Finn, we’re getting a process of hero-formation that echoes Luke’s and yet also reverses it, since this story isn’t about a hero stepping into his pre-ordained heroic role so much as rejecting his pre-ordained villainous one.

Because he’s growing  _into_ his heroism, Finn actually turns out to be more like Han, acting out of self-interest at first but with a purer motivation underneath that he isn’t initially aware of. Like Han’s, that motivation is nurtured when he befriends the other heroes. Like Han, though, he hits a point where he refuses the cause and runs away to protect himself, disappointing his new friend. And like Han, he changes his mind when that friend get into trouble and he goes all-in to help them, which allows his truly heroic qualities to emerge.

Like Han, that major new relationship is with the Force-sensitive hero, and in the end,  _she_ is the one who defeats the villain and Finn’s role is primarily to help her, to delay her opponent until she’s ready. But unlike Han in ANH, Finn suffers major consequences for helping Rey. In fact, Finn kinda ends the first film in a way not unlike the way Han ends the second—defeated and in stasis, and separated from the other hero, but with that hero promising to find him again. But unlike Han in ESB, Finn’s influence on Rey is purely positive—instead of leading her into peril, his sacrifice motivates her to win.

What’s surprising about Finn and Rey is how they move  _between_ parallels with the three OT heroes: Finn is a Luke who starts too early and turns into a Han, and Rey is a Luke who turns temporarily into a Leia, while throughout,  _both_ of them trade the Luke role back and forth, so it’s unclear which one of them will be holding the Luke-ball by the end. (For all we know, maybe they bothcould.) But as much as TFA tries to put bothof them in the Luke role as a dual protagonist, it’s actually Finn who carries the majority of the protagonist role, even though he does spend some time tagging along after the more zealous aspiring rebel, Rey, like Han does. Unlike Han, he moves us the most actively through the film, but like Han, he ends by teeing up the villain for Rey’s victory.

What this means, I think, is that the hero of TFA, unlike the hero of the OT, is not the believer but the doubter—and unlike Luke, Han, or Leia, he  _starts out_ as an anonymous (albeit clearly special) member of the bad-guy army—one of the guys who are just cannon fodder in the OT. Because of that, he’s the most unique and unprecedented element in TFA. Despite some of those OT roles he steps into, we’ve never seen anyone remotely like him before, so we  _really_ don’t know what role he’ll play as the storyline moves forward—especially since it’s implied that he can access the Force too, although maybe in a different way (i.e. not as inherited) than Rey does. If  _Finn_ turns out to be Force-sensitive, it seems more likely that he’ll have to cultivate it, he’ll have to make an  _effort_ rather than just discovering it—which would trulybe an unprecedented event in Star Wars.

My hope for the ST as a whole, in fact, is that it will democratize the Force and give it not just to a few aristocratic chosen ones but to everyone—to anybody who commits to it. There are a number of suggestions in TFA that this is where the story is going—for instance, characters like Lor San Tekka and Maz Kanata who aren’t Jedibut who “know about the Force.”

**Finn _and_ Rey and Luke  _and_  Han**

Once Finn meets Rey, his OT parallels shift from Luke to Han: he puts on Poe’s Jacket of Handsome Rogue-hood and steps into the role of morally ambiguous partner to the more uncomplicatedly heroic Luke-figure, Rey. For the next act, Finn is the Han to Rey’s Luke, echoing Han’s cautious self-interest in ANH in his attempts to check Rey’s heroic bravado. The escape from Jakku in the Millennium Falcon, though, reverses these identifications, so that Rey plays Han in the cockpit (and later in the maintenance recess) while Finn plays Luke in the gunner’s turret. (Finn, I guess, steps into the Leia role in ESB, as the Person Who Bickers With Han While Han Tries to Fix the Ship.)

Finn and Rey trading the Han and Luke roles back and forth has the effect of making it really hard to tell who’s the Primary Hero and who’s the Secondary Hero. In the OT, Luke was clearly the sole protagonist and Han, although a hero, was secondary. In the ST, neither Finn nor Rey is a sole protagonist: they’re both equally important. Arguably, Finn’s importance is weighted more toward the beginning of the film and Rey’s more toward the end, but the film ends less with a  _handing off_ of the story to Rey than with the sense that these two characters’ story paths will simply diverge, at least for the next film. (Which of course is what happens in ESB as well.)

In general, Rey  _seems_ to be identified with Luke and Finn with Han—certainly this is visually the case, Rey in her  light-colored desert clothes and Finn in his cool jacket—but the elevation of the Han/Finn role from secondary hero to co-protagonist changes the dynamic of the story, particularly the distribution of values between the two heroes. In the OT, Luke and Han were frequently opposed as types: innocence vs. experience, idealism vs. cynicism, spirituality vs. practicality. And of course, while innocence needed experience’s  _help,_ innocence aligned itself more closely with heroism. In the ST, no such value polarity exists. Rey, while she has some of Luke’s sweet optimism and craving for adventure, isn’t particularly “innocent"—she’s suffered a great deal and so she’s curmudgeonly and suspicious of people, like Han. She can and will hurt people. Finn, on the other hand, while offering the experienced and practical voice on certain matters, is often innocent in others because he’s been raised in institutional isolation, and so his connections with the First Order make him the Han-like voice of caution and practicality while also casting him in Luke’s role as the "this is all new to me” audience POV character. Finn and Rey are  _both_ innocent, and  _both_ experienced, in different ways.

In other words, the ST doesn’t privilege innocence and purity of heart the way the OT did. Both protagonists have a certain blank-slated-ness to them, but in both cases, it’s a consequence of violence and trauma. Rey is an unsocialized wild child and Finn is a child soldier—both “innocent”, in their way, but not because they’ve been protected from evil. Meanwhile, the character whose parents  _tried_ to protect him from evil, whose mother wouldn’t even think angry or fearful thoughts while he was in the womb, and who was best positioned to step into the Heroic Skywalker Callow Youth role once he grew up, took a wrong turn somewhere and is now the villain. It’s as if Ben Solo’s turn to the dark side left a protagonist vacuum for Finn and Rey to step into.

This is where you could read a certain meta-commentary into the film’s plot: the traditional White Male Protagonist has become the bad guy, leaving room for women and people of color to be heroes. But it’s equally important that the ST is attempting to say something new (for Star Wars) about heroism and evil. The ST takes place in a world in which there are no longer any protected enclaves free from the influence of evil. Nor does it contain any philosophical mentor-figures who can teach you how to resist the evil that threatens your soul. The film’s two mentor-figures, Han and Maz—the ST’s answer to Obi-Wan and Yoda—are both pirates, practical teachers who can show you how the world works but can’t provide much spiritual guidance. Well, okay, Maz can. But even  _her_ advice is less about telling good from evil and more about seeing things for what they are—"look, kid, your family isn’t coming back, so take the damn lightsaber and go.“ Maz cures you of your self-imposed delusions but she can’t tell you anything you don’t already know.

This missing center, this spiritual wisdom that would put the world to rights, is of course Luke Skywalker. It’s Luke’s absence, and the fall of his spiritual successor, Ben Solo, that makes heroes like Finn and Rey necessary—heroes who have no guide through the maze of good and evil but themselves and each other.

Which brings us to…

**Kylo Ren as Luke and Vader**

Kylo Ren is very obviously the Vader of the ST. If the visual design and music callbacks didn’t make this clear, we can observe that in the first act of TFA, he plays Vader’s role in ANH as the seeker of important information in a droid; he’s also on a quest to find Luke Skywalker, like Vader was in ESB; he’s the apprentice of a powerful Emperor-like figure; and somebody’s on a quest to turn him back from the dark side. He interrogates people; he Force-chokes people; he has a black mask and a red lightsaber, etc. etc. etc. It’s so obvious that the movie offers an in-universe explanation: Kylo himself idolizes Vader and is modeling his career on Vader’s, making it his express goal to "finish what [Vader] started” (i.e. destroy the Jedi, one assumes).

But seen from another angle, Kylohas a lot of parallels with  _Luke._ Kylo, Vader and Snoke are a diabolical parody of Luke, Obi-Wan and Yoda, in a way: Kylo as the promising apprentice and last remnant of the Skywalker bloodline whose grand destiny is to save the galaxy from “evil” (in this case, the Jedi and the Resistance) if only he can avoid temptation by the “dark side” (in his case, the light side). He even has a dead mentor he consults for guidance. Luke’s dead mentor, though, appears to him as a ghost or a ghostly voice, whereas Kylo’s is just a physical relic, inert and mangled. Does Kylo ever hear Vader’s voice? We certainly don’t.

Like Luke, Kylo is a little skaky in his training, but he’ll prevail (he thinks) if he can pass the final “test” of facing and defeating his father. But  _unlike_ Luke, Kylo accepts this test at face value and performs it literally, despite warnings from his intuition (i.e. the light side of the Force). That intuition, of course, might just be sentimental attachment—which is exactly how Obi-Wan and Yoda see it in ROTJ. But Luke follows his intuition instead of his mentors’ orders and finds an alternate way to “face his father” and neutralize the evil he represents—disobeying both Obi-Wan and Yoda. So Kylo is a better-behaved apprenticethan Luke ever was, and maybe even a better  _Jedi,_ if what makes a good Jedi is a willingness to put necessity before personal attachments and desires.

So Kylo effectively condenses the characters of Vader and Luke into a single figure. This isn’t surprising, since the OT presented Luke and Vader as doubles —pre-Vader Anakin was the hero on which Luke molded himself, and Vader was always the person Luke  _could_ become if he gave into the dark side. But Kylo’s character takes this identification a step farther. After all, Luke “defeated” the dark side by embracing or at least accepting it in the form of his father, whereas Kylo, by combining Luke and Vader into a single character, experiences that dark-side/light-side conflict  _internally._  Only later films will tell us how someone committed to the dark side can see the light side as a  _temptation_ , since in Yoda’s philosophy of the Force, that very idea would be nonsense. Is Kylo being fed false doctrine by Snoke? Or is Yoda’s perspective not the whole story?

Luke’s training and loss of Ben to the dark side deliberately echoes what happened between Obi-Wan and Anakin—but the fact that Kylo seems to be playing out a dark version of Luke’s career suggests not just that history is repeating itself, but that the very  _doctrine_  of the Jedi Order might itself be causing this evil to recur every generation. That doctrine, of course, is the very idea that the dark and light sides of the Force are separate and opposed.

**Han as Luke and Obi-Wan**

In TFA, Leia’s “there’s still good in him” echoes Luke’s words about Darth Vader, and the mission she sends Han on asks him to play Luke’s role at the end of ROTJ. But Han knowshe’s no Luke. Leia effectively says “I’m not asking you to play Luke’s role as Jedi but as family, i.e. it’s your personal connection to Ben that matters.” (Her actual line is, “Luke may be a Jedi; you’re his father.”) And Han accepts this—not as assurance he’ll  _succeed,_ but as a reason to  _try._ So, he tries to step into Luke’s role as redeemer of lost dark-siders, but ends up playing Obi-Wan’s role as doomed mentor cut down by the villain whose loss forces our heroes to accept greater responsibility.

And we see this coming, since Han has, of course, been playing Obi-Wan for the whole film: he’s the one who tells Rey and Finn about the Force and guides them on their journey (albeit much more gruffly and reluctantly than Obi-Wan did). And this is a very ironic role for him to play, since Han in the OT was the biggest Force skeptic of all. Han stepping into the Obi-Wan role tells us something, both about him—he’s learned over the years to take the Force seriously—and about the world we’re in—very few people know much about the Force now, since all the experts are either dead, missing, or evil. The world of the ST is rudderless and amnesiac, a spiritual dark age from which all reliable authorities have vanished.

So the tension is generated by our awareness of Han’s two OT parallels: Obi-Wan in ANH, and Luke in ROTJ. And when that tension resolves in favor of Obi-Wan when Han dies, Han’s loss is made extra sad by our knowledge that he doesn’t have the power, like Obi-Wan did, to speak to us from beyond the grave. (We have to wonder, though: Obi-Wan said “strike me down, and I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.” Will Han’s influence somehow persist as well?)

Most importantly: Han’s death makes it impossible to predict what will eventually happen to Kylo. Han failed where Luke succeeded, so we know that Kylo  _can’t_  follow Vader’s trajectory. If the ST is going to end with the last Skywalker turning back from the dark side, which is the only ending that would keep it from being hopelessly tragic, then at this point, we really have  _no idea_ how that could possibly happen.

Our only clue is Rey’s final duel with Kylo, which echoes the duels between Luke and Vader in ESB  _and_ ROTJ. Like Vader in ESB, Kylo tries to turn Rey to his side with an offer to teach her—but instead of losing her hand, Rey  _wins._ She even has a momentary dark-side moment like Luke has in ROTJ when he finally cuts loose on Vader. But instead of resolving anything, Rey’s duel with Kylo is arbitrarily cut short, saving Rey from having to decide whether to kill him or not.  _Both_ Rey and Kylo are frozen in that moment when Luke refused the dark side and Vader accepted the light—so the event that  _ended_  the OT becomes merely a pause in the ST’s ongoing storyline. Will the ST find another path to the same resolution? There’s no way to tell.

* * *

I didn’t even get into larger plot stuff: Death Star/Starkiller Base, droids with documents in them, the Resistance/Rebellion vs. the First Order/Empire…but to me, all of that just serves the character parallels. In short: what’s brilliant about TFA’s parallels with the OT is that, while they make the story and characters feel familiar _,_ they actually  _prevent_ us from predicting how the next two films will play out. Which I just love!

**Author's Note:**

> This meta was originally posted on Tumblr, but I'm posting it here to make sure it's preserved.


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